Kill All Methods-Free the Practices

Of course, your (favorite) method will resurrect with the liberated practices

The way we develop software struggles to keep pace with changes in technology and business. Even with the rise of agile we still see people flip-flopping from one branded method (or to be more fashionable framework) to another throwing away the good with the bad, and behaving more like religious cultists than scientists.

Can we truly enable and empower our teams and become true learning organizations whilst we behave more like the fashion industry than an engineering profession? Can we really see our ourselves as an open, diverse and collaborative community whilst we continually attack one another and rebrand, reinvent and rename everything like old hipsters trying to stay in with the in-crowd. Are we doomed to be locked in a never ending method war in the hope that the one true way emerges to rule them all?

The answer is no. There is a simple way to break out of this cycle of unhealthy competition between methods that are more similar than they are different, and that is to free the practices. Free the practices to rise and fall based on their own merits. Free the practices so that teams can experiment, innovate and plug and play with proven practices to create the way-of-working that they need today and seamlessly evolve into the one they need tomorrow.

Dr. Ivar Jacobson delivered this presentation at a keynote address at SECR Russia in October 2017. He revisited the history of methods, explained why we need to break out of our repetitive dysfunctional behavior, and introduced Essence: a new way of thinking that promises to liberate the practices and enable true learning organizations.

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